Fit To Drop 4: How many calories can you burn in a minute?

Or perhaps I should have headlined this “Forever burning Bubbles”.

For here is a whole new way to look at chocolate. Take the Aero Bubbles pack nestling temptingly in our fridge door. There are 60 mint-flavoured chocolate balls in the 180g pack – which tells you in the small print that just 12 add up to 186 kcal.

So what do you have to do to burn off 186 calories?

In my case, as proved by the screen grab excerpt, it took well over a sweaty, gasping mile jogging up a particularly long and unfriendly hill.

The Ki Fit armband sensor and software I’ve been putting to the test show me burning about 17 calories per minute during a jog of six-plus miles. A mile takes me a little under 9 mins, so do the maths!

Even scarier is my calorie-burning rate during a particularly stressful day at the office, when I peaked at about 3 cals/min.

In other words it would take an hour of particularly frantic keyboard-bashing to shift that chocolate – and about twice as long as that to burn up those calories in my sleep.

At least walking to the station burns 7 to 10 cals/min, and a weekly spell of horse-riding accounts for 10 to 12 cals/min (not bad when the horse is doing most of the work).

And how many calories have I used in writing this? About enough for just ONE of those air-filled chocolate Bubbles. Oh joy!

* Fit To Drop 3: Who ate all the pie charts?

* Fit To Drop 2: Tagged? No, I’m just trying to be healthy

* Fit To Drop: Time for a healthy scientific approach

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• dendeb

  Why did you run UP the hill, surely going the other way would have been easier!
  How many calories are burned eating the chocolate?
  If I think quite seriously about going for a jog, how many calories is that?
  Is there something I’m not getting here?

• http://twitter.com/Broxted Ciaran Rehill

  M. K take up squash.

• http://twitter.com/mrpling Andrew Brier

  According to recent research your body continuously burn calories not only during the exercise but also at an increased rate for some considerable time after too (like days). If the calorie tracking devices and software were to be believed then you’d never be able to eat anything of any substantial content without running the Bob Graham lake district route afterwards to compensate!

• Guest

  Were I to try and jog a mile I fear the interest in my calories expended might well be how many my heart attack took.

  An exaggeration, but running for a bus and some walks are enough at the moment.

  I seem to remember that a walk of 50 miles loses 1lb body fat, is that right?

  No way out of eating and drinking less.

• TommyTCG

  A load of misinfo. Due to various homeostasis mechanisms in human physiology, the metabolic rate will increase or decrease depending on when, how often, what and how much food is eatenAnother such mechanism is thermogenic effect, and that is bone structure-dependent.In any case, its the carbs. that fatten!Digested carbs first top up muscle and liver glycogen stores, then the rest rapidly converts to bodyfat in the cell mitochondia via the citric acid, Krebs, cycle. Meanwhile digested fats only slowly convert to energy molecules in the liver.Repeating the idiotic garbage spewed ou by dieticians hardly helps anybodys health.

• http://twitter.com/making54 martin king

  If you run a circular route from home, you end up going up and down in equal measure anyway.